Interstacks monitors machines and sensors so you can increase productivity, reduce maintenance costs, or add remote monitoring features to your OEM industrial equipment.
It does this by using snap-together, modular electronic blocks – Stacks, and an integrated IoT cloud platform – MyStacks IoT cloud.
One result of our ongoing investment in product development is that the MyStacks IoT cloud platform is always getting new features based on customer input.

In this blog post, we will summarize some of the additions to the MyStacks platform in the most recent software release (v 2.8.1).

Substring search filter in selector popups
In the dashboards, stacks, and tags pop up selectors, you can now type any substring and the pop up selector list will be filtered by that substring. For large deployments, this makes finding what you want much easier.

Mulit-tag report widget more display options
In the multi-tag report widget, you now have more display options. Cells can display one or more state values and transition counts (number of times a state is transitioned into). Previously only all states were displayed in a cell.

Multi-tag report widget for weeks and months
Contact your Interstacks support engineer or info@interstacks.com if you are interested in multi-tag reports for days, weeks or months. Previously, only smaller time windows, like shifts, were directly supported. Of course many shifts, days, weeks, months can be in the report and the previous and next buttons let you move through time.

Seconds to Days-Hours-Minutes display format
Values in seconds, can now be displayed in Days-Hours-Minutes-Seconds format. Use cases like machine runtime values in seconds could result in very large numbers of seconds. Contact your Interstacks support engineer for more information.

MyStacks login Usernames now not case sensitive
When you login to your dashboards, the Username is now not case sensitive.

Contact us
To ensure you are using the newest MyStacks software v 2.8.1 (viewable from “About Us” in the top right main menu), open a dashboard in a browser tab, close that browser tab, open a new browser tab and go to a dashboard. You need only do that one time.

The support section of the web site includes more comprehensive information on using our MyStacks IoT cloud platform.
MyStacks

As always, please contact your Interstacks support engineer or email
info@interstacks.com  with your questions and feedback.

In this blog post, we will summarize some of the additions to the MyStacks platform in the most recent software release (v 2.6.0).

Add Notes to Dashboards

By using the “+” icon in the top right of your dashboard, you can add the new Notes widget.  Now you can add team collaboration notes to dashboards to log maintenance and operations events. It behaves like a group messaging app. Like all widgets, the gear icon allows you to create a new topic, or select from topics that already exist. Then, just type any text you want. The text is timestamped and labeled with the user account that entered the note. All messages are saved and a scroll bar allows you to scroll back to view previous messages.

OEE Circle Widget

OEE is overall equipment effectiveness. The new OEE Circle widget can display many productivity metrics like up/downtime in the circular percentage format. States are defined in the tag settings tab. It also supports shift times. More OEE features and OEE widgets will be added in the future.

Datapoint widget now supports icons

New features have been added to the existing Datapoint widget. You can now use colored icons, like “red light – green light” indicators in the datapoint widget. These features can be accessed via the “bell” icon in the widget title bar. We will be adding more icons in the future.

More MFA and SSO login features
For our large enterprise customers, we have added more flexibility to the optional multi-factor login process (MFA) and now support single sign on (SSO) logins. These options are now accessed through the user profile area. Multi-factor login codes can be sent via email or text message. Employees of large companies often need to use a large number of cloud based products. Single sign on (SSO) support allows their IT departments to set up a single login/password for all the software they use.

New Stack Configuration Tool
To configure network settings for wifi and ethernet based stacks, we have added a new stack configuration tool that runs in a web browser (Chrome or Edge). You use the USB-A to mini USB cable from a laptop to the stack that needs configured. The stack configuration tool is in the support section of our web site in the Software section.

Hardware Manual
We are in the process of upgrading our training and documentation materials. The support section of our web site now includes a comprehensive hardware manual that covers stack hardware overview, hardware blocks, and sensors.

Hardware Manual

Contact us
To ensure you are using the newest MyStacks software v 2.6.0 you can clear your browser cache and restart the browser.
 
The support section of the web site includes more comprehensive information on using our MyStacks IoT cloud platform.

MyStacks Manual

As always, please contact your Interstacks project support engineer or email info@interstacks.com with your questions and feedback.

Interstacks News – Vibration monitoring, Use Cases, MyStacks additions, Digital In

Wireless Vibration Monitoring
Machine, pump, and motor operating conditions are often indicated by their vibration characteristics. Well before a failure or stress reveals itself in a complete breakdown, vibration anomalies can be detected. Interstacks’ new wired and wireless vibration monitoring starter kits make it easy to capture real-time vibration data, view it on the MyStacks dashboard, and get real-time text/email alerts based on that data. The wireless kit uses a bluetooth vibration sensor and the wired kit uses a RS-485 digital data sensor. email info@interstacks.com for more information.
Vibration Monitoring Starter Kits

Solar Panel-Battery Monitoring
Interstacks is now being used to capture real-time voltages and currents from mobile solar panel-battery units. The GPS location of the mobile unit is also sent to facilitate theft detection. Real-time input and output, voltages and currents are sent to the MyStacks dashboard over the cell data network. This deployment can sense DC voltages up to 70V and DC currents up to 500A. This is another example of an industrial OEM using Interstacks to add remote monitoring features to their existing product.
Monitor Solar Panel-Battery Starter Kit

Digital In Hardware block
As part of our continued R&D investments, we have added a new hardware block for 0-30V digital inputs. This block has four opto-isolated inputs with separate grounds. This is sometimes used to input PLC digital outputs or other machine outputs, for example from CNC machines.
Digital In Block

MyStacks New Features
One result of our ongoing investment in product development is that the MyStacks IoT cloud platform is always getting new features based on customer input. The most recent additions include: more alert condition options, multi-factor authentication (MFA) login options, more direct ways to add users to organization accounts, and performance improvements for large dashboards.

MyStacks Features

Webinar Feb 8
We will be doing a webinar on Feb 8th 2024 titled “How IoT can work for you – Capture data in manufacturing to improve productivity and reduce maintenance costs”. This is part of an education series from a manufacturing consulting and training organization called Catalyst Connection. Catalyst helps many manufacturers in Pennsylvania improve their operations.

Webinar

Contact Us
Please email us at info@interstacks.com to discuss your machine and sensor monitoring projects. Or adding IoT features to OEM products – we private label hardware and MyStacks cloud dashboards for OEMs. Our engineers and system designers would love to talk with you about your projects.

Machine, pump, and motor operating conditions are often indicated by their vibration characteristics. Well before a failure or stress reveals itself in a complete breakdown, vibration anomalies can be detected. Reduce your maintenance costs and prevent operational downtime by adding real-time vibration monitoring to your industrial assets.

Monitor vibration for motors, pumps, compressors, machine tool spindles, conveyors, gear boxes, blowers, dryers, robots, transport vehicles, conduits, and pipes using a wired or wireless vibration sensor. The sensors communicate with an Interstacks stack using wired RS485 or wireless bluetooth. They both include temperature sensing in addition to vibration data. Multiple sensors can communicate with a single stack if within bluetooth range or if using a multi-drop RS-485 chain. The stack will be pre-programmed to send data to the MyStacks IoT cloud platform (or other servers) for real-time visualizations and alerts. View the vibration data from any web browser, on any device, anywhere. Get alerts via text or email based on criteria you select. Email us at info@interstacks.com for more information.

Use wired RS-485 or wireless bluetooth vibration sensors. Use ethernet, wifi, or cell data to send data to the MyStacks IoT cloud platform. The bluetooth sensor is a 3 axis MEMs based and can be set to +/- 2g 4g 8g 16g range. If using 60 minute wakeup and send, battery life is 3-4 years. If continuous send, battery life is 3-4 months. (Battery is easily field replaceable.) The wired sensor uses RS-485 serial data and is 2 axis. This allows for continuous monitoring without replacing bluetooth sensor batteries. The stack hardware would use a RS-485 block instead of bluetooth. Vibration data includes RMS velocity, peak velocity, peak acceleration in g, RMS acceleration in g, and others.

Here are links to some vibration monitoring starter kits. Email us at info@interstacks.com for more information.

Wireless starter kit

Wired starter kit

MyStacks Recent additions
Interstacks helps you monitor machines and sensors so you can increase productivity, reduce maintenance costs, or add remote monitoring features to your OEM industrial equipment. It does this by using snap-together, modular electronic blocks – Stacks, and an integrated IoT cloud platform – MyStacks IoT cloud. One result of our ongoing investment in product development is that the MyStacks IoT cloud platform is always getting new features based on customer input.

In this blog post, we will summarize some of the more recent additions to the MyStacks platform.

More Alert conditions – edge alerts
When setting conditions for text/email alerts, there are more conditions to choose from. Alerts can now be sent only when a signal enters a new condition, as in an edge transition.

Multi-Factor Authentication Login
If you want to enable Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) for enhanced login security, please contact your Interstacks support engineer or email info@interstacks.com and it can be enabled for your account. For every login, a unique code can be sent to the email address for the user.

Create/Update User in Organization Management
New user accounts can now be added directly by your account administrator via the Organization Managment widget versus requiring an email invitation process. Simply select “Create/Update Users” and you will see a dialog to add a user account.

Performance Improvements
In addition, there have been performance improvements in refreshing and pulling data from the MyStacks cloud database into the dashboard browser. Only the minimum data necessary for a visualization refresh is pulled from the cloud. This results in faster updates and improved responsiveness with more complex dashboards.

Contact Us
The support section of the web site includes more comprehensive information on using our MyStacks IoT cloud platform. As always, please contact your Interstacks project support engineer or email info@interstacks.com with your questions and feedback.

Interstacks helps you monitor machines and sensors so you can increase productivity, reduce maintenance costs, or add remote monitoring features to your OEM industrial equipment. It does this by using snap-together, modular electronic blocks – Stacks, and an integrated IoT cloud platform – MyStacks IoT cloud. One result of our ongoing investment in product development is that our MyStacks IoT cloud platform is always getting new features based on customer input.

In this blog post, we will summarize some of the more recent additions to the MyStacks platform.

Multi-Tag Report Widget

One of the new widgets you can add to your dashboard is the Multi-tag report widget.  When you have multiple sensor or data feeds from one or many stacks, you can use this widget to view count or state information from all of them. A table/spreadsheet view has a list of tags and user defined time periods. These time periods could be hours, days, or user defined shift periods. Each cell in the grid is an aggregate of time in each state, percent of time in each state, or an aggregate of counts (open/close digital count).  Of course the most recent column is updated in real-time as data is received.

If you wanted to monitor the productivity of many machines in your factory, you could use the Multi-tag report to see counts of units for each machine by shift.

Sharing Dashboards

Many customers have large teams that work together to monitor their operations. A number of dashboard sharing features have been added to support those workflows. After you have multiple dashboards, you may want to rename, delete, or make one your default. To do this, select the three vertical dots icon in the top right of the scrollable page area. You will then see a pulldown list with those choices. You can duplicate the current dashboard by selecting “Duplicate this Dashboard”.

If you want to share your dashboard with all the users in your group, select “Share Dashboard”. From the pop up, select the group to share this dashboard. Click on “Share”. Now this dashboard can be accessed by anyone in that group based on the privileges (admin, read only, write) they have been assigned for that group.

The shared dashboard will automatically show up in the dashboard list of all of the users in the group when they next log in. Multi-user sharing is achieved through locking and unlocking a shared dashboard. Shared dashboards always open in the locked state. If a user chooses to modify the dashboard (and they have write access), they can click on the lock icon in the top right to unlock it.

The unlock will be successful if no one else has exclusive access to the dashboard already. When unlocked, the current user has exclusive access to modify the dashboard until they lock the icon once again.

If you have a large number of dashboards, you may want to manage them by creating groups of dashboards. To create a dashboard group, simply name (or rename) dashboards using a prefix name for the group followed by a period character, then the specific name of that dashboard. For example, if you name dashboards “MyGroup1.machine1”, “MyGroup1.machine2”, “MyGroup1.machine3”, when you go to the dashboard selector, you will see a single entry called “MyGroup1”. If you select the arrow icon for that group, you will expand (or contract) the list of dashboards in that group. To go to a specific dashboard in the group, simply select it.

Tag properties

Various configuration settings for tags now default to being centralized in the tags tab section of the Stack Management info popup rather than distributed in visualization widgets. You can get to the centralized tag properties popup via direct links from visualization widget configuration panels or from the blue Info icon in the Stack Management widget.

The centralized tag properties will be reflected in all visualization widgets that have the “Use tag settings” checkbox checked. The tag name can be changed as well as the units label used in visualizations. Each section of the tag properties can be expanded or collapsed using the arrow icon. Numeric measurement properties can optionally include a scaling factor and a fixed offset. Threshold properties configure the Gauge, Line chart, and Tank level dividing lines (to represent nominal, above nominal zone1, zone2, zone3). Asset properties allow you to assign internal asset numbers to a tag. State properties define the mapping from raw data to “states”. For example, below 80 could be the state “cold” and above 80 could be the state “hot”. These states are used in various visualization and reporting widgets.

Alerts

A number of additions have been made to criteria used to trigger email or text alerts. More sophisticated alert logic can now be used. For example, requiring a trigger condition to be met for a sustained period of time.

State history and state table widgets

More extensive state management capabilities have been added. State properties define the mapping from raw data to “states”. For example, below 80 could be the state “cold” and above 80 could be the state “hot”. Or below 20 Amps could be “Machine Off” and above 20 Amps “Machine On”. You may define as many states as you need. You can also set a minimum time period required to enter a defined state. These states are used in the State history, State table, and Multi-tag report widgets.

The “State Table” widget will show a timestamped list of all defined states for a single data stream (tag). When you configure the widget, you define state trigger levels for the data stream and each state’s name. The list shows start, end, and duration times.

The “State History” widget shows a bar chart indicating the percentage of time or total time the time series data (tag) spent in each state during each hour and a text table summary below the chart.

Contact us
The support section of the web site includes more comprehensive information on using our MyStacks IoT cloud platform.
As always, please contact your Interstacks project support engineer or email info@interstacks.com with your questions and feedback.

China has 83 million manufacturing workers. The U.S. has 12 million manufacturing workers. We have begun the great supply chain decoupling. How can this possibly work?

Why decouple now?
Why is the world decoupling supply chains from China now? The pandemic has shown that dependence on single source Chinese manufacturers for critical items leaves the world very vulnerable. For many items, just-in-time inventory management must move to just-in-case. “Covid really put a spotlight … on supply chain risk, and one of the things that we’re seeing is supply chain derisking has moved all the way up to the boardroom level, as we see now concentrations in our supply chains that was maybe not evidenced before,” according to PwC U.S. Chair Tim Ryan.

The combination of the trade war and pandemic showed that retailers also had relied “too much” on production in China, former Macy’s CEO Terry Lundgren told CNBC earlier this year. Japan’s government has started subsidizing some companies to invest in factories in Japan and South-East Asia as part of efforts to reduce reliance on manufacturing in China. They have allocated over $500 million to this effort. In addition, geopolitical trade wars and western populations sick and tired of sending jobs off-shore are creating political pressure in the West. China’s crackdown on freedom loving people in Hong Kong and the mainland, and the repression of the Uighurs in internment camps present the world with a moral dilemma.

Manufacturing capacity
Lets look at the current state of global manufacturing capacity.

China has 83 million manufacturing workers and the U.S. has 12 million. The U.S. has as many people working in the manufacturing sector today as it did in 1949.

What are some possible solutions to solve the disconnect between a desire to diversify supply chains and lack of manufacturing muscle outside of China? Mathematically, you have to dramatically increase the productivity of the workers you have and add more workers. These two dynamics are tied together. When workers are more productive, they can be paid more and the jobs become more prestigious thus attracting more talent.

Invest in workforce training
From IndustryWeek: “According to the U.S. Department of Labor, as of July 2017, a record 6.8 million jobs that require skilled laborers were left unfilled. Many of them are manufacturing jobs. The National Association of Manufacturers reports that a skills gap has caused about a half-million manufacturing jobs to remain open, and consulting company Deloitte predicts that by the end of this decade, as many as 2.4 million manufacturing jobs may go unfilled, putting $454 billion in production at risk.” Manufacturers must start investing more in up-skilling their workforce. The attitude that every open position must be filled by someone already skilled in that job must stop. There is no way for the normal citizen to stop working and pay for additional education to increase their skills in a rapidly accelerating technology based world. What companies are taking the lead in this challenge? The companies that are winning. Amazon recently announced it will be spending $700 million to retrain about a third of its workforce in an effort to improve the technical expertise of its entry level coders and data technicians.

Decrease the obsession with four year college degrees
At some point in the past several decades it became the goal to send every child to a four year college, regardless of the cost or the resulting job prospects. It is yet another effect of the decline in the prestige and investment in the manufacturing workforce. Apprenticeships, on-the-job training, and vocational programs at community colleges are all ways young people can be taught blue-collar and manufacturing skills. These are also paths that lead to a successful life. Germany’s world-renowned manufacturing apprenticeship system has created a middle market manufacturing base envied by the world for its quality products and expertise.

Invest in automation to increase worker productivity
You would think that the country with the largest number of lower cost manufacturing workers would be the one investing the least in modern automation.

Let’s take a look at the number of robots.

Not only does China have the largest number of baseline workers and the largest number of highly skilled manufacturing engineers (e.g. CNC expertise), but they invest the most in automation. As for the United States, according to the researcher Eric Brynjolfsson “We did a survey of 850,000 plants [with partners including the U.S. Census Bureau] and found very little adoption of robotics, only 1% of plants are using them so far.”

The country with the most automation has the most manufacturing workers. No jobs will be lost, in fact they will be gained through deploying advanced manufacturing technologies like the industrial internet of things (Industry 4.0, IIoT) and robotics.  A 2019 European economic study found that companies that did not invest in robotics between 1990 and 1998 reduced jobs by 20% between 1998 and 2016, whereas those that did invest from ’90-‘98 created 50% more jobs during the same time period. Dramatically increasing worker productivity via deploying real-time operational data collection and automation will create the virtuous cycle of increasing worker pay, increasing the prestige of manufacturing jobs, and increasing the supply of people wanting to work in manufacturing.

Will we accept the challenge?
The great multi-decade uncoupling has begun but it will fail leaving the world exposed to disruption time and time again unless the pace of modernizing manufacturing dramatically increases. If the pandemic and its impact on critical medial supply chains plus China’s crackdown on freedom loving people does not motivate us to correct this, nothing will. We will deserve what we get in the coming decades: an entirely service based economy held hostage by Chinese manufacturing, increasing inequality and unrest due to the bifurcation of low pay service jobs and very high pay knowledge based jobs, exacerbated by the inability to repay college debt. Strategically, morally, and financially, the global supply chain must reduce its dependence on China, especially for critical products. The path forward is clear on how to accomplish this. Will the United States and the free world accept the challenge?

#iiot #automation #chinadecoupling #industry40 #manufacturing #supplychain 

REFERENCES

Japan to Pay at Least $536 Million for Companies to Leave China   Bloomberg July 18 2020
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-18/japan-to-pay-at-least-536-million-for-companies-to-leave-china

Companies plan to continue shifting supply chains out of China, says PwC exec CNBC Oct 23 20
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/23/pwcs-tim-ryan-on-supply-chain-moves-from-china-under-biden-or-trump.html

The Unnecessary Crisis in the American Workforce
Somehow the notion that a four-year college is for everyone has entered the national zeitgeist, but it’s just not true. IndustryWeek Aug 28 2020
https://www.industryweek.com/talent/education-training/article/21140507/the-unnecessary-crisis-in-the-american-workforce

Unmade in America  Decades of decline left the US’s industrial commons incapacitated in the face of the pandemic. MIT Technology Review Aug 14 2020
https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/08/14/1006428/unmade-in-america/

Recent research shows that only 1.3% of firms have adopted robotics, and incremental investment in robots. CNBC Sep 16 20
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/16/why-amazon-warehouses-tesla-auto-plants-will-not-go-100percent-robot.html

Manufacturing employment in China
The scale of manufacturing employment in China dwarfs the numbers of manufacturing workers in other countries;
https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2005/07/art2full.pdf

We are proud to be the smart IoT electronics partner in the Elon Musk Foundation funded project to install 150 smart water drinking  fountains in Flint Michigan schools. A stack is embedded inside a water drinking fountain by our OEM partner. Sensors for water flow and water quality are connected to inputs on the embedded stack. Two outputs control water valves for directing water to the water sensing area and to shut off the main valve if poor water quality or a water leak is detected. Sensors are sampled every second and the data is sent to a cloud dashboard for real-time monitoring. Software inside the stack uses algorithms for sensor processing and water leak detection. Real time information on drinking fountain usage also helps optimize maintenance costs. This is a great example of adding smart IoT features to previously “dumb”, unconnected OEM products. We have many on-going projects that follow this pattern, although none can match the tremendous societal impact of water quality for our children.

While the press coverage of the Flint MI water crisis comes and goes, the problem is not magically going away any time soon and affects all of us, not just Flint. See Pennsylvania Gets an F for not addressing lead in school drinking water

Here is a major National Geographic article on water quality. Five years on, the Flint water crisis is nowhere near over

This is one of many links to press coverage of the Elon Musk Foundation donation. Elon Musk’s $480,000 donation to Flint public schools will help provide students clean drinking water

We say a lot around here that the biggest limitation to IoT adoption is a lack of imagination and ambition in the world. We congratulate our OEM, system integrator, and foundation partners in overcoming this limitation with flying colors!

The world of 2018 is the world of NOW. Whether its consumer goods, food, transportation, even dating, we expect everything NOW. We all know that in this winner-takes-all world, the companies that have real-time agile operations throughout their entire value chain will prevail. And yet, time and time again organizations fail to introduce operational innovation into their current operations.
Why is this? We see many companies that have been around a very long time, often over 100 years, that have been doing the same thing the same way most of that time. Their workforce has been doing the same thing that same way. The past several decades have been focused on cost accounting and cost reductions as a remedy to investment community pressures and global competition. We have squeezed about as much juice as possible out of that approach.

Unfortunately, that has resulted in workforce reductions that leave no one left to support experimenting with new operations technologies. Teams that are maxed out just keeping the trains running on time are then tasked with also tracking, researching, and experimenting with new technologies. This results in the optimism of early engagements dying on the vine due to no one’s fault. Yet we know our future competitiveness will rely on real-time data feeds from everywhere via I IoT, robotics, edge intelligent automation, and big data analytics.

One solution path is to set up a small, dedicated team for thinking out-of-the-box about current operations and task them with innovation experiments, ideally completely non-disruptive to current ops. The history of change and innovation is rife with dedicated “skunkworks” teams from Lockheed’s SR-71 to the Macintosh team with the pirate flag flying above the building. Staffing that team with a mix of younger, more tech-savvy workers and experienced “old-timers” has many benefits beyond the obvious.  The existence of these team(s) can help with attraction and retention of the soon-to-be prevalent Facebook generation in our vital manufacturing facilities. They also provide a forum for knowledge transfer across the generations. Other solutions we see attempted are using outside consultants from the business, IT, and system integration realms. This can be a great help to speed up the front end of the innovation and change process, but without that internal dedicated team working in concert with the outside team, it oftentimes just “kicks the can down the road” resulting in the same dead end. We all know how to do this: Imagine if you had a blank sheet of paper today, what would your operations look like?; Experiment with short term, low hanging fruit wins; Invest in continuous education of the workforce. But as long as that change introduction function has no dedicated resources, it will never happen.

Pied Piper and the Distributed Internet

During the long hiatus of Game of Thrones, the hottest TV show among the tech crowd is HBO’s Silicon Valley. This brilliant send-up of the tech industry follows the rollercoaster fortunes of a Valley startup named “Pied Piper” as it repeatedly pivots from one Next Big Thing to the next. The brilliance of the show (apart from its spot-on caricatures of every known denizen of the tech universe) lies in the fact that these Next Big Things always turn out to be not only plausible, but downright compelling. Pied Piper’s clueless but visionary CEO is determined that his company is not going to merely become a billion dollar “unicorn”, but that it would make the world better along the way.

This season’s Next Big Thing was particularly interesting: Pied Piper’s plan was to create the “New Internet”. Instead of sending all our data to one of a few service providers or “cloud services” where it can be controlled, organized, throttled and often inspected by our Network Overlords, the New Internet would be peer-to-peer. Pied Piper’s plan was to use the vast spare capacity of the world’s cell phones and other devices to build an ocean of data, controlled by no one, as a common resource for all humankind. If you and I are sitting in the same room and I want to send you, say, an email message, no longer would that message have to travel to some distant city just to get from my machine to yours—our devices would simply communicate directly, with no giant all-powerful corporation as part of the story.

Fantasy? Well, not really. The irony is that this “new” model is exactly how the Internet was intended to work all along. Folklore tells us that the ARPAnet (the prototype for the Internet) came into existence because the US government was worried about its ability to communicate in the wake of a nuclear war, when all centralized infrastructure could be assumed to have been destroyed.  If “Ma Bell” and her centralized trunk telephone lines were gone, how would we ever pull the nation back together? They sent the problem to the best technical minds of the era. The answer that came back was a radically distributed ocean of computers—a network with no “center” and with no one in charge. The basic idea of the ARPAnet was that countless tiny packets of data would find their own way to their destinations, “routing around failures”, and taking advantage of any available path, no matter how obscure. Pied Piper’s Next Big Thing turns out to be a Very Old Thing indeed.

Not only is it a Very Old Thing, it is also a Very Good Thing. The architecture of the ARPAnet was so well-conceived and so properly engineered that almost 40 years later, these basic ideas are still there, doing their job without anyone giving them a thought. The Internet’s basic architecture is one of the great engineering achievements of all time. The thing is this, though: We no longer are taking full advantage of what the Net can do. Most of this self-healing democratic peer-to-peer awesomeness goes unused as we force all of our data through a small number of immense, centralized worldwide data channels, and store it in a relatively tiny number of “data centers”, each built on an epic scale. These facilities are “distributed” in a fashion (they have to be or they wouldn’t work at all), but not in the way that the creators of the Internet intended. Rather than emerging from the chaos of trillions of independent, democratically-determined decisions, the patterns of today’s Internet are the result of highly-orchestrated, centralized decisions made by a few techno-bureaucrats, ultimately guided by the interests of a small number of corporations.

Why did things evolve the way they did? The answers are not technical, they are economic. All technologies are dependent on funding, and long-term funding is always dependent upon profitability. It is not that distributed computing cannot be profitable, it is just that the path to profitability was a bit less obvious in that direction than in the direction of centralization. We already knew how to operate and profit from large, centralized enterprises, so it was only natural to pattern modern computing in the image of General Motors and WalMart. This approach has gotten us a long way: It has put a supercomputer on every lap and a Star Trek communicator in every pocket. But it will not get us much further. The so-called Internet of Things (IoT) is a whole new ball game. First of all, the sheer numbers of devices is vastly greater. For every cell phone, there will soon be a thousand lesser devices controlling every aspect of the built world. More importantly, the negative consequences of centralization become much more clear in such a world. Do we REALLY want every light switch in our living rooms (or lifesaving devices in our emergency rooms) to be dependent on some distant data center? Do we REALLY want to be forced to push every proprietary detail of the operations of our factories to some third-party “cloud” service whose data integrity and security practices are out of our control? The degree of centralization implied by such a world just doesn’t make sense, and it will not happen. (For example, home security/automation provider Nest had its entire ecosystem go off-line due to some technical glitch, totally interrupting all non-physical interaction with all of its smart locks, cameras, etc).

Today, a hundred real-life Pied Pipers are working on a new generation of edge-computing devices, making use of peer-to-peer mesh networking, local computing, and distributed storage. They are swimming upstream at the moment—the development environments, management tools and user expectations all need to be reworked to pull this off. But the center will not hold. The long term value proposition is clear and the trend is inevitable. We will follow these pipers into a new world that will work very differently from the one we are used to—much  more local, much more robust, much more secure, and ultimately much more democratic. It is not that “cloud computing” will go away. For many purposes it makes perfect sense. Buying computing resources as needed from Amazon adds agility, scalability and robustness to software startups. Cloud-based visualization and monitoring systems that “roll  up” data across the enterprise is by definition a centralized function. But a great deal of functionality that is now being done in a centralized manner does not belong there. The “New Internet” really is coming, and it is going to be very, very distributed.

Peter Lucas is board chair of Interstacks, Inc, and co-author of the book Trillions: Thriving in the Emerging Information Ecology.